Abstract

We describe a technique used by the ASHiCS project (Automating the Search for Hazards in Complex Systems) to discover high risk air traffic control (ATC) scenarios. We use a fast time ATC simulation of an en-route sector containing multiple flight paths and aircraft types, and into this we inject a serious incident (cabin pressure loss) which forces one aircraft to make an emergency descent. In order to create additional workload for the air traffic controller (ATCo), we also introduce a storm moving across the sector. We measure the associated levels of risk by analyzing the simulation outputs, selecting scenarios on basis of most risk and mutating aircraft entry times to see if the search can discover variant scenarios of even greater risk. The search space is extremely large and cannot be exhaustively searched for the worst case; this is a problem for safety engineers who require a context to search results so that event probabilities can be determined. While providing context cannot demonstrate that the worst case scenario has been found over all input permutations, it can indicate the expected frequency of that result in its near neighborhood, allowing analysts to focus on a much reduced parameter range when investigating those aircraft in conflict.


Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

https://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/gecco/gecco2013c.html#CleggA13,
https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2464576.2464669,
https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/2081727944
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2464576.2464669
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Published on 01/01/2013

Volume 2013, 2013
DOI: 10.1145/2464576.2464669
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA license

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